


Nomenclature

by Nny



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bonding Through Trauma, Gen, Jossed, M/M, Pre-Slash, Slow Build, Thoroughly Jossed, Tiny Oblique Mention of Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-28
Updated: 2015-06-28
Packaged: 2018-04-06 14:52:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4226046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nny/pseuds/Nny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><strong>Nomenclature</strong><br/>(noun)<br/><em>the devising or choosing of names for things, especially in a science or other discipline.</em></p><p>I’m not him,” Barnes says, and Bruce twists without meaning to, looks at the blank lines of his face.</p><p>“Him?”</p><p>“Sergeant Barnes,” he says. His mouth twists a little when he says it. “Bucky.” </p><p>“Okay,” Bruce says. He knows about names, about who gets to choose them, about which ones get <em>given</em>. He knows about the power that lives in that. “So who do you want to be?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nomenclature

**Author's Note:**

> Not beta-read, please let me know if there are any errors.

Bruce chokes himself aware, the cold nipping at his exposed flesh, biting hard at his side where he's sprawled on the concrete. He flinches at a sudden movement; the orange blanket that's tossed over him is one of the thin waffled kind that they give to victims, to patients, to the injured and in shock, so he's reasonably certain there's someone more deserving. There always is, after. He hauls it around himself anyway, looks up, and he's not sure who he was expecting. 

"No one dead," the Winter Soldier says, tone flat as ever, "seventeen injured. Mostly Hydra." 

He jogs away before Bruce can make any sort of a reply, which is probably for the best. Irrational as it is, he has to work hard not to hate him a little for the 'mostly'. 

-

It's late when he emerges from the lab that night - because after there are always people, and that's - that doesn't so much work, for him. The tower is dimly lit, the lights flaring slightly before him and dimming behind, somewhere between warning and welcome. It glances off the edges of things, anyway, lessens the unpredictability, guides him towards the kitchen area and the ever-present coffee. 

The world outside the window is a man-made galaxy. Maybe it makes Tony feel big and important - although the better Bruce knows him, the more he doubts it - but it manages to make Bruce feel small, and he's grateful for that. Not small enough yet to fit into his bedroom, hence the coffee he wouldn’t normally touch, but he's working his way down to it inch by slow inch. 

He's not sure how long he stands there, but when he turns to leave he catches the faintest glint from the corner of his eye. 

The couches are sinfully comfortable, of course, but he wouldn't have thought the man ever relaxed enough to sleep. Maybe there's some truth to that, all of him straight lines without a hint of softness. There's a throw on the back of the couch, and it's not warm in the room. Bruce turns away without touching it, doesn’t come close enough, doesn't look at the tight lines of the Soldier's face; he speeds his steps back to the lab. 

(In the morning the Soldier is nowhere to be seen and everyone else is laughing at Clint, whose reflexes had only just saved him from a black eye when he'd brushed past the couch.

Care doesn't look the same on Bruce as it does on other people).

-

“Everyone okay?” Bruce asks later, casual as he can make it, focusing on his tea so there’s no need to meet anyone’s eyes. 

“I’m good, Doc,” Clint says. “Ego’s bruised a little, maybe, but -”

“But it could use it,” Natasha finishes for him, and by the curl at the edges of her words Bruce would guess she’s smiling. 

Bruce clears his throat, gives the strainer far more attention than it deserves. 

“And the - Sergeant Barnes?” 

“The Sergeant Barnes is fine,” a flat voice says from behind him, and Bruce lets the spark of startled attention wash through him, stomach to shoulders to fingertips and out, watching as his knuckles flush gently pink again. 

“Good,” is all he says, but Clint is laughing. 

“ _Sergeant Barnes?_ ” he says. “What is this, Jane Austen? _Harlequin?_ ”

Bruce stirs his tea, lays his spoon on the counter with a soft clink, walks out of the door while they’re still laughing. 

Laughing is good.

-

He and Barnes weren't ever precisely introduced. Mostly the others leave him alone, aside from Tony, who wanders in every now and again to ask questions about radiation and medication and occasionally the greatest hits of Kylie Minogue - Bruce still has no idea what that one was about. He hears about things second or third-hand, is the point, unless he remembers to ask JARVIS directly for an update, and he hasn’t got accustomed enough to the voice from the ceiling to be comfortable doing that just yet. JARVIS has apparently intuited this - Tony’s intelligence is both incredible and terrifying - and generally announces a desire to communicate with a low beep from the wall, the mechanical equivalent of a politely cleared throat. 

It’s how he’d learned that Steve was back, how he knew that there was another room occupied in the tower. But they were never actually _introduced_ , and it was only by inference that he’d recognised the man with the dragging sweatpants, the overlong sleeves that still didn’t quite hide silver fingertips. 

He’d had files, gently steaming tea, but he’d managed to juggle things enough that he could hold out a hand anyway. 

“Hi,” he’d said, “Sergeant Barnes? I’m -” he’d stumbled over it for a second, trying to work out which name they’d used. “I’m Dr Banner. Bruce.” 

Barnes had looked at him for a second, expressionless, before his lip had curled a little and he’d walked away. 

_Yes,_ Bruce thought. _That one_. 

-

Bruce flinches awake, unprepared for the space limitations and almost ending up on the floor. He’s lost the day again. There hadn’t been much of it left when Tony had persuaded him onto the couch with popcorn and M&Ms and a documentary with some British scientist with floppy hair, but he’d had _plans_. 

Tattered remnants of sleep are still draped over him, a barrier between him and the world - alongside a blanket that he hadn’t seen before he’d fallen asleep, one that Tony must have gotten specifically, and that settles something inside him in a way that’s unfamiliar. This doesn’t feel like any way he’s used to waking up, calm and quiet and breathing steady, but even before the thought’s fully formed there’s another soft scrape from the kitchen and Bruce sits abruptly upright. 

Barnes doesn’t look around, but Bruce doesn’t fool himself for an instant that that means he hadn’t heard. He clears his throat.

“Couldn’t sleep?” he asks, soft enough there’s excuses no one needs for the lack of an answer. But there are two mugs on the counter, steaming faintly in the half-light, and Bruce doesn’t so much coffee unless insomnia forces his hand, but right now he wouldn’t admit that under torture. (He winces at the stray thought, turns around so that he’s looking out of the window, because it’s not fair to look at the lines of Barnes’ back the way that Bruce is looking at him). 

There’s quiet for a time. Just drawers, liquid, the faint ring of ceramic against granite. Bruce can hear Barnes' careful footsteps as he crosses the room to the doorway, which is a courtesy he hadn’t expected. 

“I’m not him,” Barnes says, and Bruce twists without meaning to, looks at the blank lines of his face. 

“Him?”

“Sergeant Barnes,” he says. His mouth twists a little when he says it. “Bucky.” 

“Okay,” Bruce says. He knows about names, about who gets to choose them, about which ones get _given_. He knows about the power that lives in that. “So who do you want to be?” 

He’s wincing even as he’s saying it, hunches down a little in the couch, but there’s no reaction but thoughtful silence. 

“I’ll let you know,” Barnes - the Soldier - the man says, and slips out. The scent of Tony’s expensive coffee fades a little with him and now Bruce can tell it’s undercut with something different, with tea from Bruce's caddy that’s derisively labelled ‘foliage’ in Tony’s scrappy script. 

The mug is warm against his hands. 

-

Natasha calls him Dr Banner, for the most part, and for that she will always have his lasting gratitude and respect. It’s for that reason he hasn’t asked her to call him Bruce - partly because of the way her voice had sounded when she'd said it last. Partly because he’s afraid she'll say no. 

Coulson, Fury, Hill call him by his title. JARVIS, too. Clint mostly shortens it to ‘Doc’. In the little time he’s spent in Thor’s company he’s been Noble Banner, Friend Banner, Good Doctor, and has had an imprint of Thor’s big hand clapped into his shoulder blades, but Thor is an anomaly in every possible situation you could name. Steve sticks with Dr Banner. Bruce wishes he wouldn’t. 

And then there’s Tony. To Tony, Bruce is Green. Big Green, Green Machine, sometimes Lean and Mean in there too. He’s been Big Man and Big Guy; Big Boy only lasted long enough for Tony to half kill himself laughing, although sometimes Tony will snort over his work and Bruce can tell he’s thinking it. Tony uses words like weapons, quick-fire and sharp-edged, but he’s come to the conclusion that they’re not aimed at him and he’s not sure how to deal with that. (Somehow it’s hardest when Tony calls him Bruce). 

He lives in a tower of Babel, is his point. It’s a chaos of half-finished sentences and jokes he doesn’t understand, a shifting landscape of emotions and alliances built on names he doesn’t always know the provenance of. But he’s got kind of used to living on foreign soil, so he sticks with the limited phrasebook of names he knows and picks up what he can. 

(Barnes doesn't call him anything; he doesn't talk much at all.)

Line redrawing is a complication but not an impossible one, not until he brushes hesitant fingers against the man’s elbow to get his attention, for lack of a name, and stillness shivers out from the contact until neither of them are even breathing. 

_Shit_ , Bruce says, or thinks he says, or something. _Please, please don’t -_

After a second the man takes in a breath, a deep one; lets it out. His fingers flex against the counter in ways that Bruce is familiar with, intimately. 

“Yeah?” he says, after a second. 

“I - coffee?” Clint’s across the kitchen, looking mournfully into the empty pot. Offering to make more is essentially an empty gesture; the pot’s never been empty more than half an hour as long as Bruce’s lived here. Still. 

“Sure,” he says, and then, grudging, “thanks.” 

Bruce is pretty sure Steve’s drilled it into him. Bruce shrugs and smiles and moves his hand away, sets beans to noisily grinding, the call of the lesser spotted Stark. 

“Loxley,” Tony says after a moment, shuffling across the tiled floor - he sounds like he’s been sleeping. “Big Green. Barnes.” 

“Tin man,” the man says, a sharp smile hiding in his voice, behind ragged hair. 

They call him that - Barnes. It seems safest; Steve’s the only one who calls him Bucky, and no one else wants to look at his expression when there’s no response. 

No one else seems to touch him. 

-

The Soldier’s eyes snap open and Bruce flinches back, pulls his fingers away from the softly ticking pulse. 

Somewhere metal groans, but the structure is currently safe; Bruce was carefully counting heartbeats so it continues that way. 

Something explodes in the distance. 

“No one on our side’s badly injured,” Bruce says, because he’s learned that sometimes that’s the most reassuring thing you can say. “The other side, there’s some - casualties, but -” a bitter laugh licks out around the edges of his words, “I cannot adequately describe to you how much they deserved it.” 

The Soldier tugs at the fabric covering him, balls it up in his hand and looks at it. It’s garish against metal, orange and waffled, for victims and patients and the injured and Bruce knows superheroes so that’s getting steadily less true; people in need, though. Maybe. 

“Thanks,” the man says, like someone learning a language. Bruce isn’t sure he speaks it well enough to come up with a reply.

“We should go,” he says instead, and there’s the slightest pause at the end as though there’s something missing. 

“James,” the man, the soldier, the Soldier offers, after a moment. “Call me James.” 

“Bruce." Bruce holds out a hand, and James regards it for a moment before Bruce swallows at the feel of a callused palm against his as he hauls himself to his feet. He takes a second, shifts his weight, rolls his shoulders, then flashes Bruce the closest thing to a smile he's ever seen on the man's face.

"Good to meet you," he says.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me [on tumblr](http://www.villainny.tumblr.com/) :D


End file.
